Jojo Moyes never imagined her writing career would take her this far.

“Success came to me relatively late,” Moyes says. “I was not an overnight success by any stretch of the imagination. I’d written three books that didn’t get published before I had one published, and all I could think was that I finally got my name on a spine. I was so excited just to have published a book.”

Then came Me Before You, the 2012 novel that sold millions of copies worldwide. “Everything that has happened since then has so far exceeded any possible expectation I had for myself. I’m so grateful and so happy.” And then, with the sense of humor her readers have come to expect from her characters, she asks, “Does that sound really nauseating?”

Moyes has written about topics as varied as horseback librarians in 1930s Kentucky (2019’s The Giver of Stars) and London women who accidentally switch gym bags and wind up literally walking in one another’s shoes (2023’s Someone Else’s Shoes). With her latest, We All Live Here (Pamela Dorman/Viking, Feb. 11), she turns her focus to one family’s chaotic but relatable life. The novel follows Lila Kennedy, a writer who published a successful book about keeping the spark alive in her long marriage…a mere two weeks before her husband left her. Now Lila lives with her two daughters and her stepdad while balancing endless home repairs, her next book, and an exciting (if confusing) new dating life. When her biological father shows up begging for a place to stay, things get a bit too crowded for comfort. The novel tackles grief, aging, parenting, and heartache, but always with Moyes’ signature warmth and her deeply human characters.

“I feel really strongly that my characters should be allowed to mess up,” Moyes says. “There isn’t a person among us that hasn’t made a couple of catastrophic decisions in their life. Humans are so good at assuming we understand what’s going on in somebody else’s head, but we’re really spectacularly bad at it. We mostly don’t have a clue.”

Moyes recently spoke with Kirkus via Zoom. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Many of your books are written on a really large canvas, but in We All Live Here you zeroed in on one family. What drew you to this story?

I’ve always wanted to write about a family that wasn’t the conventional “mom, dad, and 2.4 children” structure, because I didn’t grow up in that kind of family. I grew up with two stepbrothers, one half-brother, and two half-sisters. It may not be the typical family structure, but we all love each other.

Also, I’m in my 50s, and you do a lot of introspection in your 50s. One of the themes that comes up a lot, at least for me, is forgiveness. What do you let go of and whatdo you take forward? Lila is blind to the ways in which she’s going to reproduce her family’s past by taking it into the future. I wanted to examine whether she can see clearly enough to free herself and her family from that burden—but in a funny way.

Speaking of humor, there are so many heavy situations in We All Live Here—including Lila’s divorce and the loss of her mother—but you still manage to write about these struggles in a funny way. How do you balance humor with more serious topics?

I love when I read a book that can make me feel something, whether it makes me laugh or cry. We’re in a time that feels particularly dark, and I feel like the world is beset with a lot of challenges. What I want to do is address them in an indirect way and make people laugh while I do it, because my aim is to make people feel a little bit better.

It seems that women in midlife are having a moment in fiction. In We All Live Here, Lila’s agent says that “sexy menopause is all the rage right now.” A lot of readers are gravitating towards female characters who are beyond their 20s and 30s—what do you think is behind this, and what drew you to writing about a character at this turning point in her life?

Well, I hope you’re right, because it’s a demographic that has been hideously underserved for decades. For years, the only mothers in fiction were dead or put-upon or being cheated on. What’s been great, especially for me as a woman in my middle years, is to see that women are being represented in a 360-degree way now. They can be funny, they can be childish, they can be annoying, they can be irritable, they can be highly functioning and also falling apart at the seams.

I like writing about ordinary women getting through stuff with messy lives and money worries. They have their moments of giddiness and their moments of sadness. I just try to write characters who are as fully fleshed out as the people that I know. When I look at the women around me, I see a kind of heroism. I see women who are managing finances, working all the time, taking care of everybody’s emotional needs, looking after elderly parents, caring for young children, and stepping in when their friends need help. Not to say that men never do this, but I think there is a very particular female experience that comes with this age that I wanted to show without it looking like a grind. A lot of my friends are really silly, and I wanted to represent the kind of friendship where there’s silliness along with the serious stuff.

We All Live Here is full of so many vivid characters, like Lila’s stepfather, Bill (a lentil-obsessed health nut) and her biological father, Gene (an egocentric struggling actor). Who was your favorite character to write?

Gene! Every now and then you get a character that just falls into your lap. It happened in Me Before You with Will and Lou, it happened in The Giver of Stars with Margery, and it’s happened in this book with Gene. He’s this really fun combination of ego, childishness, kindness, and impulsivity. He’s basically just a big man-baby who’s never had to grow up. And as someone who’s worked in Hollywood a bit, one of the things you see is that acting is a profession where people don’t always have to grow up or take responsibility. Gene is the absolute extreme version of that, but as the book goes on, you realize that there’s more to him than you thought.

What do you hope readers take away from We All Live Here?

Firstly, a bit of joy because I think we’re all in dire need of it at the moment. The Giver of Stars was a very serious book to write, and it kind of pulled everything out of me. I felt like my entrails were in that book. Since then, I’ve wanted to write something lighter. I want people to finish this book feeling a bit better about human beings and life in general, and perhaps with a bit of an understanding that what you see isn’t always what’s going on behind the scenes.

Kerry Winfrey is the author of Waiting for Tom Hanks and other titles.